'King Kong' Broadway musical review: This monkey is a turkey

If you’re going to make a Broadway spectacle of “King Kong,” you better have an impressive monkey -- and on that count, the new “King Kong” musical delivers, at least somewhat. The Kong created for this show is a 10-ton, 20-foot-tall beast, surprisingly convincing in his musculature, eyes and face, and operated by three “voodoo puppeteers” using remote controls backstage, and another ten onstage puppeteers who move the creature by way of an elaborate system of cables and pulleys.

Matthew Murphy

He roars. He bounds across the stage. He leaps in the air. He roars again. Near the end of the show, when Kong moves downstage and begins interacting with — and roaring at! — those in the front rows, the wow factor is considerable. You can see where the creators spent the reported $36 million it took to mount this production.

As to whether we ever forget that we’re watching an enormous manmade contraption — or whether we ever feel fully transported to his lair on the mysterious Skull Island — that’s another matter.

It’s difficult to make lifelike a puppet that’s rigged to dozens of cables and has a metal scaffolding attached to his back.

And even though they are clad entirely in black and obscured partly by Kong’s giant paws and hindquarters, the puppeteers are hard to ignore. When Kong wages war with an equally ginormous cave serpent, who has his own puppeteers, there are so many people onstage, occasionally bumping into one another, that the show begins to look like a Keystone Cops routine by way of a Mike Myers “Dieter” sketch.

Matthew Murphy

The rest of this “King Kong” musical? Pretty much a disaster, replete with cringe-inducing dialogue, one-note acting and more than a few “Huh?” moments. (Why are all the sailors on the ship to Skull Island packing handguns? Why are the sentient trees on the island doing what appears to be interpretative dance?) It’s pretty clear that “King Kong” director / choreographer Drew McOnie (making his Broadway debut) and book writer Jack Thorne ("Harry Potter and the Cursed Child") invested so much energy in their star attraction that they never actually got around to building a viable show around him.

The story sticks closely to one told in the 1933 movie, in which would-be starlet Ann Darrow (Christiani Pitts, wan and forgettable) sets off with megalomaniacal nature film director Carl Denham (Eric William Morris, hammy and forgettable) to Skull Island, where they discover the massive beast. But in this telling, it all just comes across as sluggish and confusing. (The Jack Driscoll character — a shipmate who falls in love with Ann, played by Bruce Cabot in the original film and Adrien Brody in the 2005 remake, has been dropped altogether.)

Matthew Murphy

Nor is it especially apparent why “King Kong” needed to be a musical at all. The show works best in its action set pieces — the initial discovery of Kong, whose big chompers slowly emerge out of the darkness, or the chase through Skull Island to capture him. (The various chase sequences are staged with the help of some nifty rear projections by Peter England.)

But every time the characters start singing and dancing, it just seems discordant and pell-mell — the momentum halts, again and again. The score, by Marius de Vries and Eddie Perfect, is a baffling hodgepodge of classic Broadway, rumbling bass, anachronistic electropop and an especially awful Alanis Morissette-soundalike power ballad that closes the show.

Matthew Murphy

Whether the scale and spectacle of the thing is enough to turn “King Kong” into a hit remains to be seen. Perhaps where some respond with laughter at the production's glaring inanities, as happened on the night I saw it, others will embrace the show as something cheerfully cheesy and endearing.

But from my seat there’s a line between kitsch and chaos, and “King Kong” is far on the wrong side of it.